SFBatKid Won The Internet (And Our Hearts)

Last Friday something trueley amazing happened in downtown San Francisco. For one full day, the Bay Area city ceased to be San Francisco and was transformed into Gotham City.

When one thinks of Gotham (the city where Batman fights crime) they usually compare it it to New York City, but this time the location was on the west coast of the United States to help make the wish of one little boy come true.

Miles Scott is a five year old boy who has dreams much like other children his age to become a real super hero. However, Miles also battles something much worse than the Joker and Bane; Miles is currently battling leukaemia. While this is quite sad to see a boy so young have to deal with something like this, for one day last week he got to forget about it for a day as the Make-A-Wish Foundation helped to make Miles’s dream come true. Miles spent a full day helping Batman fight crime around San Francisco as the caped crusaders sidekick, BatKid.

With the help of the city of San Francisco and a ton of volunteers who heard about Miles’s dream and wanted to help out, SFBatKid was born. And not only did BatKid concur the villans of this fake Gotham city, but he also concurred the hearts of thousands around the globe who were watching the days events unfold around Miles in real-time via social media.

On Friday alone, we found that the #SFBatKid hashtag was used in 305,603 tweets from around the world.

However, not everyone was using the #SFBatKid hashtag. Some were also using just #BatKid or some outlets that don’t rely on hashtags were just referring to him as BatKid. When we took that into account we found that BatKid was actually mentioned 490,180 times across social channels on Friday. There was 1,144blog posts, 2,462 online news articles, 1,636 forum postings and 484,938 tweets in total about BatKid.

But, as we all know, stories like this don’t just stop there. There was a ton of residual talk about the SFBatKid throughout the weekend. So, we expanded our search to look for mentions of him Friday through Sunday and sound that SFBatKid talk had risen to 662,703 mentions by the end of the weekend.

While the story of SFBatKid sounds cool on it’s own, it looks even cooler. Throughout the day volunteers who helped with Miles’s big day and onlookers were documenting the little caped crusaders adventure. When we looked up tags for #SFBatKid on Instagram we found an astounding 16,059 pictures with that tag. Not to mention all the related tags about SFBatKid that followed in tandem.

As we mentioned earlier, Miles’s amazing day as SFBatKid managed to capture attention and hearts around the world. A heatmap of where tweets about SFBatKid were coming from show us that people from every corner of the globe were cheering on this tiny hero.

Heck, even the President of the United States thanked Miles personally through Vine for his help in foiling the plans of some dastardly criminals and saving Gotham.

But Obama wasn’t the only one helping to cheer Miles on. A look at the most retweeted tweets around SFBatKid show that people were genuinely enthralled by this awesome deed for a child in need. Obama and the White House made tweets that were amongst the most retweeted, but the number one most retweeted tweet came from the Make-A-Wish Bay Area account as people just wanted to see SFBatKid in action (see the tweet below). Also making the list was an amazing one from Ben Affleck who has been tapped to play Batman in an upcoming Batman Vs Superman film. Many had questioned Affleck’s ability to be a good Batman, so he ran with it and openly admitted that Miles makes a much better Batman than him.

All in all, the event that was designed to make a young boy happy wound making people all over the world smile. A look at the sentiment around SFBatKid shows at 91% favourable. And don’t worry about that 9% negative talk you see. Most of it was people talking about the bad guys that Miles fought, and of course bad guys get branded as negative.